Users at an Internet cafe in Beijing last May. (LIU JIN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

In Denmark, however, Internet freedom went in the other direction. Danish police said a “human error”caused thousands of Web sites to be blocked in the country on Thursday, including Google and Facebook, reported file-sharing news site Torrentfreak. Users who tried to access those sites got a message saying Denmark’s High Tech Crime Unit had blocked the page because the user had offered child pornography. The problem was reportedly fixed several hours later.

Web censorship, a hot topic around the world, is becoming harder for governments to enforce.

According to Google’s Transparency Report for the first half of 2011, democracies and authoritarian governments alike made repeated requests to Google to remove certain online content from its services. Sometimes, the government believed the content was a threat to national security. Other times, the reason given was “defamation” or “government criticism.”

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